Religion and Dictatorship

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Reza A.F.

The American revolutionary thinker, Thomas Paine, once said ‘Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.’[1] One very vague definition of dictatorship is ‘Absolute or despotic control or power.’[2] Throughout history, all totalitarian regimes have sustained their grip over the conforming masses by silencing intellectual opposition and vilifying the will to question and doubt. Thereof, question and doubt are the predecessors of change and any form of intellectual-dynamism will wreck the rocks that hold this absolute authority standing rigid. The Iraqi author and academic, Kanan Makiya, in Republic of Fear characterized dictatorship through the following assertion:

‘Tyrannies and dictatorships resort to violence when their authority is placed in jeopardy. But for the Ba’ath, violence is no longer merely the ultimate sanction used periodically against a genuine opposition. The Ba’ath invent their enemies; violence – not the threat of it – is institutionalized, forever reproducing and intensifying that all-pervasive climate of suspicion, fear, and complicity so characteristic of their polity.’ [3]

[Note: The Ba’ath was the name of Iraq ’s dictatorship, which is the author’s focus]

Over the past century, we observed the brutal fists of Stalin, Hitler, Pinochet, Khomeini, and Saddam Hussein as they were clutched against resistance. The Russian novelist, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, said ‘For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.’[4] Every dictatorship and tyrannical regime that has ever been known to mankind has always silenced secondary viewpoints; its dictator has incessantly been glorified as the absolute, revered to as a God.

Religion is absolutely no different; in fact, it is dimensionally symmetrical to a dictatorship. The same parameters, from which dictatorship was algorithmically programmed, are also existentially fundamental to religion. It too is embedded with this authoritarian self-narcissism, except the alter ego of the normal mortal dictator is now a transformed immortal deity, called God. This God, like the dictator, has revealed himself through the establishment – his branded dictatorship – of religion. In this latter dictatorship, the subject [believer] cannot question the authority or decree of the dictator [God]. He/she must abide by all the eternally mandated rules brought forth, as would happen in a normal mortally-ruled regime. If the believer questions the authority of God, just as an ideological opponent – in a regular dictatorship – would be imprisoned and tortured for his/her beliefs, this immortal dictator [God] too will eternally imprison and torture his subject of opposition [in hell] for questioning his authority. The unbeliever is the ‘second writer’, from the vantage point of the religious-fascistic institution. In God’s polity, there are no ‘second writers’ because God has reserved himself as the absolute ‘writer’.

The following chilling words were once delivered by Saddam Hussein to his critical opponents:

‘Anyone who attempts to take this government from our hands shall receive Iraq as a land without people’ [5]

In Surat al-Anfal, Allah says (8.13-8.14):

“This because they contended against Allah and His Messenger: If any contend against Allah and His Messenger, Allah is strict in punishment.

‘Thus (will it be said): “Taste ye then of the [punishment]: for those who resist Allah, is the penalty of the Fire.”’

Are the subjects in a normal dictatorship not anything more than self-serving slaves to the absolute despot in power?

In the Quran, Sura 19.30, it says:

“He spake: Lo! I am the slave of Allah. He hath given me the Scripture and hath appointed me a Prophet.”

What makes Allah, Yahweh, or the Holy Father any different from Saddam Hussein or Nebuchadnezzar? Is it because of morals? If so, then, as the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran once said ‘He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked’ [6]. At least in an ideal democracy when human beings commit fatal errors, they are doing it accordingly with their own will. If they suffer, they can admit in the name of humility and experimental failure that a move of unprecedented and uncalculated error was acted upon; this is what science is about, making past mistakes and learning from it. This further demonstrates that science is the ultimate provider of justice. This is what underlies human existence. Yet, what can we conclude about the nature of the ‘almighty one’ when he has [like the average-dictator] forced us to join his human elite, against our own self-consent, and face the appropriated consequences when questioning his administrative policy? Then, when another Rwanda happens it is blamed on his enslaved subjects. When 300,000 Iraqi Shiites were slaughtered in 1991, after rising up against the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, the butcher justified it by claiming the ‘enemies’ had to bare responsibility for their actions; when Khomeini massacred tens and thousands of political prisoners throughout the 1980’s, it was all blamed on the victims. What makes the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God any different? This whole master-slave complexion of ‘inventing enemies’ and exploiting the victim’s conscience is indoctrinated within religion. Apparently it is a sin when two homosexuals engage with each other privately, but there is a moral justification for when God allows an earthquake to devastate an entire mass-population. If anything, he [God] is a malicious, sadistic being that should be put on trial for crimes against humanity.

The Need for the Absolute

There is a psychological dimension in all of this: how would human beings rationalize an incident or event that’s so profoundly abhorred, without saying ‘it must have happened for this higher reason’ or ‘it is the devil’s fault?’ Humans need a moral justification for it; they need a higher form of supreme order. The famous political-philosopher Al-Farabi argued that the state should be maintained by an ideal ‘political legislator’ [6]; and it has even been debated in one sense or another that dictatorship can only work. So in a way, religion offers the same security a political dictatorship does – or an extension thereof [however, as a freethinker I believe we have declared our weakness and therefore should fight it].

Humans cannot just stare into the abyss of chaos and expect an empty void to stare back at them. The reality is when we humans are staring and observing the universe, the universe itself could care less about ‘staring’ back at us; simply because, it’s indifferent towards us. This cosmic-ad infinitum is not meant to entertain or appease our emotional frailties; we only find it beautiful, elegant, orderly, and attribute significant meaning to it when taking our existence to be the reference point of origin. Otherwise, we are just part of a painting that was done by a blind painter.

God is not the only despot

Some sensitive people might respond to my premise asserted thus far, by contending that there are various non-religious ideologies which are also prone to this same vice. I cannot help but agree with them and this is where my stance lies. Other dogmas such as communism, nationalism, monarchism, aristocracy and many others, are also failed experiments of society that have only resulted in institutionalizing human ego and imprisoning freethinking. In religion, we have observed that man invents a God to arrogantly and blindly worship him; in nationalism, man invents a nation in which he sees a reflection of his ego and relentlessly deifies above all else. The same rationalistic yardstick can be applied and used to measure the absurdity of other ridiculous man-made ideologies as well. However, I think it is fair to say that an immortal and infinite God is far more dangerous – by several orders of magnitude – than the other associated ideologies, in that hierarchal pyramid of dogma. Nonetheless, we as freethinkers should invest all intellectual efforts to ridding ourselves from these mind-paralyzing ideologies; they have done nothing but caused endless carnage and bloodshed to mankind. Why is it so impossible to be united as one nation of humanity, whilst the Persian Empire coalesced dozens of nations across the Middle East during its golden epoch?

Conclusion

The logical parallels between religion and dictatorship are uncannily staggering. An ideally sought rationalistic society can only be achieved by keeping the wheels of dynamic thinking, rolling in perpetual motion. The intended aim of a dictatorship is to permanently fracture the axle which allows these wheels to rotate, in the first place. Religion, since the dawn of mankind, has been tantamount in succeeding this operation. It would be in the best service of mankind, to eradicate this epidemically spreading disease from the face of the earth. We should not be devolving into backwardness; rather we should be evolving into infinite scientific-consciousness of the universe. Once we cleanse our minds from this leeching ignorance [religion] that has hindered the train of human progress, then – and only then – will the cosmos be the reach of our limits.


Sources:

[1] The Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine, 1792

[2] Dictionary

[3] Republic of Fear , by Kanan Makiya, 1986

[4] The First Circle, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1968 (censored), 1990 (uncensored)

[5] mtholyoke

[6] The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, 1923

[7] An Introduction to Classical Islamic Philosophy, by Oliver Leaman, 2002